Paintings & Drawings2020produced

RANDOM MARKS ORIGINS

Where the marks came from

A wide canvas: long black strokes crossing it, a red mass pooling at the centre right, yellow lines running beneath and a pale blue haze behind everything.

The same canvas standing against a studio wall on a concrete floor. — In the studio, July 2020.

Close view: the red mass where the can was held still, a black stroke entering it and yellow spreading below.

Spray paint on canvas, 60 by 90 centimetres, 2020. One of the thirteen paintings made that year in Barcelona, and the one the others are named after.

Close view: a black stroke ending in a soft edge, red and yellow bleeding together behind it.

Close view: a broad field of yellow with one black stroke laid across it.

It is the loosest of the group. Black strokes cross the whole canvas in long single movements, a red mass pools where the can was held still, yellow runs underneath in thinner lines, and a pale blue haze sits behind all of it. Nothing is enclosed and nothing is repeated. The gestures simply happen at the size of an arm.

Close view: black strokes over the pale blue haze, a thin yellow line curling between them.

Everything the group does afterwards is a way of handling this. The four RANDOM MARKS squares take the same vocabulary and crowd it into thirty centimetres. GEOMETRIC ORDER puts it inside drawn boxes. This is the version before any of that, which is what the title is saying.